Are you Remembrancing properly?

These days, you can’t claim to have truly honoured the fallen unless you’ve had a poppy-adorned howitzer on display outside your bungalow since at least early October. And you’re rightly smeared as despicable and unpatriotic – unworthy of enjoying the dwindling freedoms our military heroes fought to preserve – if you haven’t scattered a load of limbless mannequins on your front lawn to add that special something to your DIY Somme ahead of Remembrance Sunday (a scene of unsettling thousand-yard stares because they’ve seen some shit in TK Maxx). Is your poppy smaller than a standard hubcap? Well, fuck you if it is!

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Poisoning the well

I say this most begrudgingly, but you’ve almost got to hand it to those on the right: they’re pretty good at what they do. And by that, I mean they’re very good at poisoning the well.

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Stop talking Britain down? Seriously, how do we talk this place UP right now?

Boris Johnson waving two union flags while stuck on a zip line

There’s an old YouTube video of a festival-goer wandering out of a portaloo while a Dutch TV crew are filming the facilities, who then proceeds to wash his hands in a fetid urinal. As if hallucinating a crystal clear babbling brook and snow-white bar of Dove, he picks up a urinal cake from one end of the trough then shuffles down to the other end where the piss is more plentiful, swishing his hands around in the frothy, citrine shallows. But as he rubs the deoderising block between his palms, he slowly catches on. “This isn’t a urinal, is it?” he asks the Haarlem105 TV presenter. “I think it is, man,” she regretfully informs him.

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We’re all fucked

It’s just over a week since the General Election result cemented our darkest fears, which saw unkempt pathological liar Boris™ returned to Downing Street as the country’s Supreme Leader. A whole week since I drove to work in oppressive silence, unable to bear the sound of gloating Tory Brexiters congaing through the Today programme’s studio.

Let men be damn men!

When I saw that Piers Morgan had been angered by Gillette’s ‘The Best Men Can Be’ campaign, tweeting: “Let boys be damn boys; let men be damn men,” I immediately thought of that photo of him asleep on a sunbed, laid out like a disappointing and deeply unappetising hog roast at a summer fete.

Fucking awful people

“A woodlouse munching on a fleck of shit on the floor of a toilet cubicle” may sound like a trigger phrase for an MK-Ultra assassin, but it’s something I witnessed once during a quiet trip to the loo at work. It was a truly depressing sight. A lone crustacean with possibly the most miserable existence on the planet, unknowingly providing me with an analogy for what every day on Twitter would feel like in the future: existing on a diet of shit but longing for someone to drop a fragment of Twirl.

The idiot machine

Until he’d filmed a suicide victim hanging lifelessly from a tree in Japan’s Aokigahara Forest, I’d never heard of Logan Paul. If someone had mentioned his name to me, I would’ve assumed they were talking about a budget hair salon located on a traffic-choked high street between a 99p shop and a Dixy Chicken. I would never have guessed they were talking about a YouTube ‘mega-vlogger’ with more than 15 million subscribers and a hairstyle that sits somewhere between Farrah Fawcett and Flock of Seagulls’ Mike Score. But then, life’s a learning process.

A dispatch from my safe space

I hate all this bollocks about ‘safe spaces’, as if the very notion of having somewhere you can go to be content and happy, largely insulated from the hate, fear and bullshit of the world, is somehow indicative of weakness or timidity, or an unwillingness to engage. “Get back to your safe space, snowflake!” seems to be the insult du jour on social media at the moment – often, but not exclusively, used by emboldened right-wingers (let’s call them ‘red caps’) who just love snappy slogans (Take back control! MAGA!). However, it completely loses its impact if, like me, you think of it merely as a kind-hearted suggestion. “Get back to my safe space? Thanks, I will! It’s cosy there and we have Hobnobs.”

I hate the 21st century

One minute you’re a massive wanker on a Cairo-bound EgyptAir flight, and the next, you’re a globally ‘famous’ massive wanker after having your photo taken with a hijacker wearing a suicide belt, grinning beatifically for the camera like the embalmed corpse of a man who’d died suddenly only a few pleasurable seconds into his very first blowjob.

This is viral fame in the 21st century.

The online rumour mill of doom

Facebook really is a social media platform of firsts. For instance, it was where I saw someone spell ‘flying’ with a ‘ph’ instead of an ‘f’. And thanks to Facebook’s mind-bending algorithms presenting me with largely irrelevant content produced by total strangers, I was also recently afforded the opportunity of seeing the status update of an Ibiza-loving prick with Jägermeister and foam for brains, who proclaimed that his friend was “the girl that put the ‘E’ into ‘partiE'”. (I weep for the future.)